Seaborn Themes

The seaborn python library is well known for its grey background and its general styling. However, there are few other built in styles available: darkgrid, white grid, dark, white and ticks.

You can set themes using the set_style() function of seaborn library. This post provides examples of different seaborn themes that you can use with your charts.

Libraries

Let's start by loading a few libraries:

matplotlib: for plotting
seaborn: for the themes
numpy for data generation
pandas for storing the data

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

Dataset

Our dataset will consist of 6 columns of numeric values:

data = np.random.normal(size=(20, 6)) + np.arange(6) / 2
df = pd.DataFrame(data)
df.head()

	0	1	2	3	4	5
0	-0.305213	-0.850624	-0.024465	0.992168	2.508927	0.833733
1	0.625631	1.469616	1.325944	1.108628	2.616785	1.712886
2	-2.046518	0.102678	1.763569	1.885340	2.637508	2.632234
3	0.682349	0.591841	1.808995	1.269958	3.388124	3.758841
4	-0.082201	0.391850	1.580840	1.603169	1.548844	0.812924

Default theme

sns.boxplot(data=data)
plt.show()

White grid

sns.set_style("whitegrid")
sns.boxplot(data=data)
plt.title("whitegrid")
plt.show()

Dark grid

sns.set_style("darkgrid")
sns.boxplot(data=data);
plt.title("darkgrid")
plt.show()

White

sns.set_style("white")
sns.boxplot(data=data);
plt.title("white")
plt.show()

Dark

sns.set_style("dark")
sns.boxplot(data=data);
plt.title("dark")
plt.show()

Ticks

sns.set_style("ticks")
sns.boxplot(data=data);
plt.title("ticks")
plt.show()

Going further

This post explains how to set the style of a seaborn plot.

You might be interested in how to custom axis in seaborn and how to add a title in seaborn

Colors

Interactivity

Animation

Cheat sheets

Caveats

Statistics

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